Ask HN: What is a creative way you control your smart home?

For a while, I had my RGB lightbulbs set up to flash appropriate colors when I would strike a note in Beat Saber. The effect was very neat and rave-y. The lights in the room would automatically dim to black when a song would start, and then flash the color of a struck note and fade back to black (with a speed proportional to the beat of the song).

Eventually the mod I used to expose the game events over a websocket stopped working, and the creator stopped maintaining it. I maintained a private fork of it myself for a while, but eventually got tired of spending so much time keeping it working after each game update just for the sake of a party trick.

Also my smart robot vacuum is only allowed to start vacuuming when my phone is outside a geofence around my home, and must stop vacuuming if I re-enter the geofence. I never see it vacuuming, but my floors are always clean!

Switchbot smart outlets (basically switches the AC on or off at an outlet)

In my bathroom I have a fan that stays on for 1/2 hour in the morning. I set my razor in front of it so it dries every morning. Supposedly the blade will last much longer. I kinda think so but don't have a really definite data set yet.

I also have them for the lights and bubbler on my aquarium (I think the bubbler should be off at night for 6 hours or so. Let's the fish sleep).

I have an ESP32 running ESPresence in the laundry room, door sensors on the washer/dryer doors, and suitably-sized power monitoring for the washer/dryer outlets.

When a machine door opens, I can tell who did it (everyone always has their phone or watch on and is seen by ESPresence. Once the door is closed, the power monitoring kicks in, and when the cycle is 100% done, the AirPod Minis in the house all chime. If the door isn’t opened in ten minutes, a notification is sent to the originally detected person’s phone.

If the door hasn’t opened in 30 minutes, mom and dad get a notification ;)

Not sure if that counts, but: AC unit that had no app to be controlled. Only remote via IR. I bought 360 IR blaster, placed it in range, had it learn IR codes, hooked it to HomeAssistant. Now AC is smart, can be controlled while I'm away from home, automated, fully local.

Funny enough I once built a metallic USB volume knob in a box with multiple modes, and one mode was as a controller for a WiFi bulb (along with other modes like screen brightness and of course volume) https://iams.pro/projects/knobbox/

Ultimately that was more of a fun concept than useful.

This is not as creative but is more useful: well-placed motion sensors with rules in Home Assistant to trigger lights to the dimmest possible setting at certain hours, for a late night stumble.

Even less creative but even more useful: plain old timers set up in HA that are synced with the sunset to slowly fade the lights in, and a bedtime to turn them back off.